It might seem as though we have several fundamentally different business offerings, but we find that there’s a lot of overlap. Also, working with a variety of groups and settings enriches our creativity for bringing those strengths to business situations. The seemingly different pieces of the puzzle end up being valuable complements to each other.

When we’re working primarily in a facilitative leadership role, our technical experience helps us succeed where we’ve seen other, more experienced, more talented facilitators fail. It’s one thing to be neutral on the content and guide the process; it’s quite another to understand the content well enough to know when group members are throwing up technical excuses for what are really behavioral problems. We’ve seen otherwise fantastic facilitators become less effective in such situations, because they don’t realize that what’s being proclaimed a technical imperative or impossibility is just a prevailing opinion and is not necessarily embraced as fact by the whole group.

When we’re working primarily as JMP scripting programmers or as content strategy consultants, our facilitative leadership approach enables us to help our client-side teams work more effectively together. Even when clients come to us for coding or information management challenges, they end up valuing the facilitative leadership that we employ while doing the technical job. We can help our clients explain the importance of investing in the project. We can help resolve technical disagreements by asking clarifying questions, scoping the problem in terms of the budget, and confirming relative priorities. Since we’re neutral on the business rules, we can help everybody understand each other’s differing perspectives, and then we help build small agreements into a plan on how to proceed.